I might be wrong but wouldn't this bill... well... do practically nothing if cispa passes? :x

Exactly what I've been wondering. Either our members of Congress have no concept of what either bill is about, they know what both bills are about and know that one will essentially cancel the other out for most people, or a combination of both. I really can't see any other reason for the drastically different "mood" of congress with regards to these two proposals.

I suppose that people that manage their own email outside the hands of any corporation could be protected by this new legislation while being unaffected (mostly) by CISPA. Of course, that is very hard to do for most people.

It's about time, but this rule should also extend to any 3rd party storage allocated for private personal use. Such storage is the digital equivalent of renting an apartment, and should have roughly the same protections against searches.

On one hand Congress can say "we're not allowing warrantless searches anymore" while the other hand is allowing it to happen under the guise of "national security" or "anti-terrorism." Afterall, you're not a terrorist, right? This is the logic as I see them spinning it to us even without admitting it. If this law passes it's meaningless with CISPA on the books.

I hate to be cynical, but I'll be totally shocked if our representatives pass anything this reasonable. The Homeland Security people will be coming out of the woodwork to foretell the end of civilization as we know it.

What we're going to have is drives supporting hardware encryption, and PCs and operating systems coming with TPMs and everything necessary to enable it. Concerned individuals and businesses will either not store sensitive data in "the cloud," or they'll encrypt it first. This can already be done with certain applications, services like SpiderOak, and dedicated encryption apps like TrueCrypt.

For many law abiding citizens, this will be less a response to government overreach than to the threat of identity theft. Either way, the effect is the same - someone is after your private data, and you are the only one who can protect yourself. Given federal criminal cases like Aaron Swartz and David Nosal, I wonder how many innocent parties could survive a federal forensic investigation if they want you badly enough.

The legislation under consideration in the Senate was proposed by Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and Mike Lee (R-UT), a senator with strong ties to the Tea Party. Calabrese told us that the Leahy-Lee bill "would require a warrant for all private electronic content. So it's e-mails, it's texts, Google Docs, it's photos in Picasa, it's private social networking posts."

Let hope this passes without being watered down too much. This will be a great victory if the final bill lives up to requiring a warrant for private electronic content.

I see you found my old DEC MicroVAX II. That was one heavy deskside tower. After a few years of VAXen and DECstations and rackmount network gear I swore I was never going to buy another host that wasn't a laptop. I think I got the Sun 1000D for a home video distribution server (over OC-3 ATM!) and the 64-bit Alpha workstation after that...

I might be wrong but wouldn't this bill... well... do practically nothing if cispa passes? :x

Exactly what I've been wondering. Either our members of Congress have no concept of what either bill is about, they know what both bills are about and know that one will essentially cancel the other out for most people, or a combination of both. I really can't see any other reason for the drastically different "mood" of congress with regards to these two proposals.

I suppose that people that manage their own email outside the hands of any corporation could be protected by this new legislation while being unaffected (mostly) by CISPA. Of course, that is very hard to do for most people.

Edited to finish up sentence fragment.

This bill would be a paliative to CISPA... or more appropriately, a placebo.

Too bad they don't have the gull to repeal the unconstitutional FISA Amendments Act of 2008. Why are we keeping some illegal act illegal but others "legal?" Because they admitted to committing treason when they passed the FISA amendment?

On one hand Congress can say "we're not allowing warrantless searches anymore" while the other hand is allowing it to happen under the guise of "national security" or "anti-terrorism." Afterall, you're not a terrorist, right? This is the logic as I see them spinning it to us even without admitting it. If this law passes it's meaningless with CISPA on the books.

^yeah, basically as long as fear mongering allows power to go unchecked then the people suffer.

I am glad Congress finally come to their sense concerning privacy. Though it's a bit too late I shall say. Will this bill matter at all with all these special modified hacking tools FBI currently using? Same ol' same ol', nothing will change much. But it's a dream to us, right? Yes, it's only a dream.